INSIGHT-Egypt opposition can't harvest Brotherhood unpopularity

* Secular parties split on Mursi, elections, IMF

* Salafi Nour party gaining on anger at Brotherhood

* Some Egyptians look to army

By Paul Taylor and Yasmine Saleh

CAIRO, May 5 It's harvest time in Egypt but the
secular opposition is reaping scant benefit from the Muslim
Brotherhood's difficulties in government, two years after an
Arab Spring uprising swept away President Hosni Mubarak.

Many Egyptians are looking to the army, or to more radical
Salafi Muslim groups, rather than to liberal or leftist parties
as Islamist President Mohamed Mursi and his cabinet struggle to
revive a sick economy, restore security and build institutions.

Perhaps the greatest threat to Egypt's faltering transition
to democracy may come not from what the Brotherhood's critics
regard as its attempts to grab as many powers as possible, but
from the inability of a weak and fragmented secular opposition
to offer a coherent alternative.

"I recognise that the opposition has not lived up to the
expectation of the people," said Amr Moussa, 76, a former Arab
League secretary-general, who is one of the leaders of the
opposition National Salvation Front (NSF).

"But I also recognise that there are lots of possibilities
for the opposition to rise to the challenge, especially as the
government is not really offering much," the conservative told
Reuters in an interview.

Six secular parties and a cluster of democracy activists and
intellectuals are loosely allied in the Front, created last
November to resist a decree issued by Mursi under which he
temporarily took sweeping powers to push through an
Islamist-tinged constitution.

Like the battered vehicles on Egypt's roads, the NSF often
seems held together by desperation alone. "What keeps us
together is the dire situation of Egypt," said Moussa, a foreign
minister under Mubarak for 10 years.

Mohamed ElBaradei, leader of the liberal Constitution party,
said the Front "doesn't really have the luxury right now to say
'this is the left, and this is the centre-left or centre-right'
because what we are opposing is... almost a fascist system".

He sees the NSF as representing a silent majority of 60 to
70 percent of Egyptians who reject Brotherhood rule and are in
"a national state of depression".

"BATTLE OF THE EGOS"

Yet the opposition alliance is hobbled by what one NSF aide
calls a "battle of the egos" among its leaders, and its
component parties agree on few policies.

Should the opposition engage and compromise with Mursi for
the sake of national unity, or boycott and try to weaken him to
make it harder for the Brotherhood to control the country?

Should they participate in parliamentary elections that many
believe will be skewed towards the Brotherhood, as they say all
post-revolution votes have been, or stay away at the risk of
being marginalised and looking like bad losers?

And should they back a proposed loan from the International
Monetary Fund as essential to pull the economy out of crisis
despite the tough terms that would be attached, or oppose it on
grounds of national sovereignty and social justice - or just sit
on the fence?

Each time it looks as if the Front is about to break up over
one of these issues, the Brotherhood makes another move that
reunites the opposition in shared indignation.

The latest was a clumsy attempt in April to purge the
judiciary, which Islamists believe is riddled with corrupt
former Mubarak loyalists bent on obstructing elections and laws
put forward by elected bodies that the Brotherhood dominates.

By trying to force more than 3,000 judges into retirement at
a stroke, the Brotherhood galvanised the judiciary, the NSF, the
Salafis and most of the media against itself, prompting Mursi to
beat a tactical retreat and seek a compromise.

Political analysts say the president could pick the secular
opposition apart if only he accepted some of its demands to
appoint a national unity government, replace a widely reviled
prosecutor general and pass a more even-handed election law.

"That would pose a real dilemma for the opposition. But
mutual suspicion and the Brotherhood's feeling of being under
siege are so strong that I don't expect Mursi will do that," a
senior European diplomat said.

BETRAYED

Many opposition activists feel they gave Mursi decisive help
to win the presidency by backing him in a run-off against former
Mubarak Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik last June, only to be shut
out of influence by the Brotherhood.

They feel betrayed on issues such as the constitution, the
rights of women and religious minorities, judicial independence,
and laws regulating elections, demonstrations and non-government
organisations.

"We were betrayed by the Muslim Brotherhood, we were cheated
by the Muslim Brotherhood. Now they make the same propaganda
against us as the old regime did," said Khaled Dawoud, a
spokesman for the NSF and ElBaradei's Constitution Party.

Aside from the NSF, the opposition also features a range of
Islamist parties of different shades, including two
ultra-conservative Salafi groups, as well as rebranded survivors
of Mubarak's outlawed former National Democratic Party (NDP).

The Salafi Nour Party appears to be the fastest growing,
although its claim to 800,000 members - more than the entire
membership of all political parties in Britain or France -
sounds optimistic. Nour led an alliance of Islamic purists that
won 27.3 percent of the vote in 2011-12 parliamentary elections
and has the second largest bloc of lawmakers.

Nader Bakkar, 29, the party's spokesman who has an MBA
degree from Alexandria University, says Egyptians are flocking
to Nour because, while it has strict Islamic principles, it does
not seek to monopolise power or behave like a closed family.

It is also untainted by the burdens of trying to make
government work in a chaotic post-revolutionary environment.

Like the Brotherhood, Nour activists run social and medical
services for the poor, distributing free or cheap food. That
could pay off at election time in a nation where 40 percent of
the population lives on less than $2 a day.

But unlike the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party,
which propelled Mursi to power, Nour supports a national unity
government that would include liberal opposition figures.

The party has its headquarters in a refurbished Nile-side
apartment that could be home to an advertising agency but for
the Koranic chanting coming from a TV screen on a wall in the
soft pink spotlit reception area.

"The most likely probability is that we will run in the
elections alone. It is almost decided that we will not ally with
the Freedom and Justice Party," Bakkar said in an interview.

He said Nour wanted to avoid a dangerous polarisation on
Egyptian streets into Islamists and non-Islamists, and left the
door slightly ajar to a pact with some secular parties, although
such a marriage of convenience looks improbable.

While the Nour party eschews strict public enforcement of
Islamic behaviour as contrary to Egyptian tradition, Bakkar drew
the line at wishing Coptic Christians a happy Easter. The Copts,
who comprise up to 15 percent of the 84 million population,
celebrate the most important festival of the Christian calendar
on May 5 this year.

AMBIGUITY

The NSF's leaders meet weekly on Wednesdays to try to thrash
out their many differences and take joint positions that are
sometimes a tortured lowest common denominator.

On April 18, the Front said in a statement it was getting
ready to take part in parliamentary elections while pursuing
"the struggle" to create the right atmosphere for a free and
fair vote. This ambiguity rapidly backfired on its authors.

The reality, according to two officials in the NSF who asked
to remain anonymous, is that at least two of its parties, the
Social Democrats and the veteran nationalist Wafd, are likely to
contest the polls, even if the others decide to boycott them.

Leftist firebrand Hamdeen Sabahi, 58, head of the Popular
Current party, told Reuters that if Mursi met the conditions for
a fair poll, including the replacement of Prime Minister Hisham
Kandil, the Salvation Front would run one joint list.

While most other NSF groups regard the long-delayed IMF loan
as essential to revive the economy, Sabahi said Egypt should
reject it because the conditions would further impoverish the
poor and could provoke a revolution of the hungry.

Sabahi said the NSF's weakness was exposed by those
Egyptians who want a return of the military, which ruled
directly through the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces between
Mubarak's fall and Mursi's election last year.

"The rise of calls for the Egyptian army (to take power)
reflects the fact that there is no hope in the Brotherhood on
the one hand, and no trust in the Salvation Front to save us
from the Brotherhood on the other," he said.

Ahmed Fawzy, general secretary of the rival Social
Democratic Party, admitted his group is divided about whether to
run in the elections expected to be held later this year, but
said each movement would stand on its own.

Interviewed in the party's drab office in central Cairo, the
41-year-old lawyer said the Social Democrats had 10,000 members,
and were among the few groups to have struck roots in southern
Upper Egypt since the revolution that began on Jan. 25, 2011.

Nevertheless, it was tough going, Fawzy said. "This is a
community that was banned from organising for about 60 years
when there were no real parties, trade unions or NGOs," he said.

"We now have our infant party born after Jan. 25 that has
since then been in dispute either with the Military Council or
the Muslim Brotherhood and is trying to build itself in tough
economic and social circumstances, and Egyptians are not yet
used to organised group work."

REVOLUTIONARIES

Sabahi, a former student leader who spent years in jail
under Mubarak and earlier, was third in last year's presidential
election. During the campaign, he branded Moussa "feloul", a
pejorative term for a "remnant" of the old regime.

Moussa in turn regards Sabahi as a "Nasserite crazy",
according to sources in the NSF, because of his statist economic
views inspired by President Gamal Abdel Nasser who overthrew
Egypt's monarchy in 1952 and nationalised swathes of industry.

But Dawoud, the NSF spokesman, says the Front's ideological
diversity and personal tensions mask a common purpose.

"We disagree about economic policy, we disagree about the
IMF, we may disagree about how to deal with Mursi, but we share
the same purpose that we want to defend the democratic, modern,
civil nature of the Egyptian state," he said.

The main divide in the NSF, Dawoud said, is between those
who see it as a revolutionary movement and those who see it as a
political coalition, adding that in his view, it is obviously a
political umbrella and not a group of revolutionaries.

One proponent of the revolutionary line is novelist Alaa Al
Aswany, author of "The Yacoubian Building", a satire of
corruption in the Mubarak era, who was prominent in the Tahrir
Square protests that toppled the former ruler.

"What is going on now is not so much a political conflict
between the government and the opposition as popular resistance
against a group that reached power via elections, yet is
desperately carrying on with plans to get hold of the state,"
Aswany wrote in his column in opposition daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

Rejecting any compromise with Mursi, Aswany called for the
president and his interior minister to be put on trial over the
alleged killing and torture of opposition activists.

Such talk infuriates politicians in the NSF who are trying
to position themselves as a constructive opposition and believe
the way forward is through the ballot box, not the street.

CAIRO-CENTRIC

Few secular opposition parties appear to have much of an
organisation outside Cairo and a handful of other cities,
although Sabahi's Popular Current has built support networks
among workers and students.

The Wafd has historic roots older than the Brotherhood's but
is seen by younger Egyptians as a tame Mubarak-made opposition
that never challenged him in nearly 30 years in power.

The state newspaper Al-Ahram reported that pupils at one
school in the coastal city of Alexandria were last month given
the exam essay topic: "What is your view of the alliance of
losers and thieves who are counting on a corrupt mass media to
spoil the efforts of President Mohamed Mursi?"

The subject betrayed the examiners' political slant but it
also reflected a broad disenchantment that the opposition has
failed to offer a credible alternative to Brotherhood rule.

"I don't trust the Brotherhood, but I'm even angrier at the
opposition for not putting forward any vision for Egypt," said
Randa Hamlawi, a Cairo office worker.

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